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As a regular commuter of TriMet, your experience is sorely lacking diversity. I use TriMet on a regular basis. I don't have a second car, I don't pay for parking, and my pass is $50 for the entire year -- the rest is subsidized by my employer. And I still want to avoid it like the plague. I'll focus on the technical issues and not even politics or the union-management relationship.

Using LMGTFY because it's convenient and you can readily see what the link is before you click it, here's a search of @trimet's Twitter account for "Steel Bridge." It's chock full of signal or switch problems on that bridge. And those impact my commute regularly. They're working on improvements, but not until July 2017. None of the other issues cause as many problems as that Steel Bridge. It should have a higher priority.

Customer service is available 8-5 M-F, excluding holidays. At the end of the morning rush and right as evening rush is starting.

Their on-time performance is steadily declining. March 9 presentation.. I've heard by rumor -- looking at other Twitter accounts -- that when they make these reports they define "on time" as being within 20 minutes. If that's true and those numbers are still that bad, they've got a massive problem. Their published adjustment is by 3 minutes either direction. Their published "Frequent Service" standard is 15 minutes. So if that's true, MAX is missing a cycle of "Frequent Service" almost 1 in every 4 times.

They steal on-time, in-service buses to handle MAX failures, impacting bus riders. I've missed appointments I should have made handily. And I'm not the only one. Page through the contingent of complaints to @trimet to see what a rider's day is like. There are two other accounts, unaffiliated, run by volunteers, that are really what @trimet ought to be -- @trimetscanner and @unTrimetAlerts. I rely on these.

Last year was bad enough that I continued paying my ~$5/mo pass and STILL looked to friends, family, acquaintances to get me to/from work when I could. The drive in, despite increased chance of variability due to traffic conditions, was actually pretty regular.

Tl;dr: you can't cherry-pick your trips and say MAX is reliable.. It's not.

Heh - they're working on that already.

(in all seriousness though - the Max is a pretty good deal, *especially* for going downtown).

And that is the problem. To provide the coverage that roads currently do with the convenience that roads to rail will never work. Here in the Twin Cities we have some rail running from downtown Minneapolis to the Mall of America and one from Big Lake down to Minneapolis. They are also building the Central Corridor line to connect Minneapolis to St. Paul. Now this is all fine and dandy if I actually wanted to go to any of these places but I don't and I don't live close to or work close to them either. Add to that the limited schedules and it falls down pretty quickly. I have no problem with rail when it is done well like in Paris. I don't mind walking a few blocks to and from the stations while I lived there but it was a complete system and it seems no one here really wants a system like that.

Tear up all the roads. Replace with rail.

Heh - they're working on that already.

(in all seriousness though - the Max is a pretty good deal, *especially* for going downtown).

An increase in the cost of driving would mean a permanent, structural, reduction in the value of suburbs and exurbs: too far from the city for efficient walking/mass transit, too dense for self-sufficient farming. Some will, certainly, hang on as places for the genuinely wealthy to escape from crime and those of the pigmented persuasion; but Joe "Middle Class" isn't going to be able to afford a white picket fence and two hour commute.

Dunno... if you can park enough commerce in the middle of a chunk of suburb, and run a rail line to it... (well, you'd get something like the towns around Portland, Oregon).

...actually, my cost is exactly $0.00. My employer foots the bill (and counts it as a benefit, like a huge chunk of PDX area employers do). IIRC, the employers who do this end up paying quite a bit more than what it would cover, since on average, not everyone who works here takes the train. But then, on average, most employees around here seek it as a bennie if they have to commute.

I do agree that on average, the ticket price is ridiculously small compared to operating expenses. OTOH, even if the fare were to double, it would still be one hell of a bargain. Consider that it normally costs a commuter $10-15 a day to park his car in downtown PDX (unless he has the rare employer that offers free/validated parking), and this isn't counting gasoline costs. The ticket costs ~$5 now round trip if it takes more than two hours to do everything (fare schedule here), or $86 for a monthly pass. Broken down, it's still hella cheap at twice the price (and doubling the fees, while hard on the more impoverished among us, would likely pay for the system on its own).

They publish their data in well-defined formats, including real-time location information for all buses and trains, free for anybody to use.

Anyone is free to write their own applications using their data. TriMet maintains links to many of them on their web site.

Not the original poster, but I know that many buses have bike racks on the front. For example:

http://www.ridetarc.org/rider-information/bikes-on-board.asp
http://trimet.org/howtoride/bikes/bikesonbuses.htm

It's not that big a deal to take your bike with you on the bus to work, and then ride it home.

And at the same time here in Portland, we opened our MAX red line "train to plane" service in 2001. It cost $125M to buy additional light-rail cars, and build the 5.5 miles of track from the nearest transit center, up the 205 freeway, a flyover bridge, over the southbound lanes, a parallel track to Airport Way, and the station within 50 yards of the baggage claim in the terminal. It's quite a nice way to get across town to the airport.

$2B+ for the same job seems a bit steep for only 6 years later...

Not so funny sidenote: the first day it was in operation, it was used to quickly evacuate the airport terminal - September 11, 2001.

here in portland oregon, we have one of the best mass transit systems in the country.. Tri-Met
really, in pretty much all respects but one, it's fantastic..
that one, is that for some reason, they cut off the entire bus and train system just an hour before the bars close?
is it a lack of urban planning? or another way to get and keep people in their revenue system?

a recent estimate by an accountant who got a duii calculates the actual cost of getting one at over $10k between the fines, probation costs, increases in insurance, and mandatory alcohol abuse classes.. plus, you are FOREVER branded as a drunk driver in the state computer system, it never goes off your record, and the police can pull you over for any reason or none, for the rest of your life.

so the question is, why not employ more urban planning? why not extend the (city run, not private enterprise) bus system until after the bars close?

i don't agree with driving drunk, i don't think it's some 'right' that we should have, but seriously.. in a large urban center where the population density already supports it, why can't they provide better alternatives? and no, taxi's don't have stands here (city mandate) nor do they respond to street hails (more mandates from the city "for the cab driver's protection against dangerous criminals") you MUST call the taxi company's dispatch and wait for at least 30 minutes for them to come get you.. hardly making it easy to avoid driving impared.. i suggest you look at the other practices your city government chooses to employ..

the reason they've forced you to give implied consent, the reason they've given such broad discretion to the police on the scene.. is not so that they can make the roads safer, it's so that they can grab your wallets. the sooner we get used to the idea and either acquiesce or change the attitude of the ruling body, the sooner we can start working on changing the actual problem of drunk driving..

good luck all, i'm going to go find a bar closer to home so that i can walk home at the end of the night..

http://wap.trimet.org/ makes it quick and easy to get transit information in the Portland Metro area. You can search by line # or my favorite "stop ID" every bus/light rail stop has an ID# that you punch in and it gives you real time arrival info.

Trimet homepage

http://wap.trimet.org/ makes it quick and easy to get transit information in the Portland Metro area. You can search by line # or my favorite "stop ID" every bus/light rail stop has an ID# that you punch in and it gives you real time arrival info.

Trimet homepage

Remember, the best way to start living invisible is to shop through a website that sued the world to save your personal information so you don't have to type your shipping information every time. This is much more secure and less trackable than getting on the TriMet 20 to West 10th and Burnside, or Portland Screechcar to 10th and Couch or 11th and Burnside and shopping at Powell's Books, paying cash for the entire trip.

Heck, Google Transit makes planning the trip easy by giving you transit *and* driving directions, bus fare *and* the cost of gas, and when and where to catch the appropriate transit routes...

Our local transit authority, TriMet, has a voice menu system for the "Call A Bus" bus schedule hotline. It's terrible.

TriMet: "Please speak your route number"
Me: "Thirty Eight"
T: "You said: Thir-tee. Eight. Is this correct?" (Why do they always ask this?)
M: "Yes."
T: "Please speak your current location."
M: "Seventy-second avenue and (whatever street)".
T: "I'm sorry, I couldn't understand that. Please repeat your current location."
M: "Seventy-second avenue and (whatever street)".
T: "I'm sorry, I couldn't understand that. Please repeat your current location."
M: (shouting and articulating each syllable) "SE-VEN-TEE SE-CONT AVE-EN-OO AND (WHATEVER STREET)!!"
T: "I'm sorry ..."
M: (Presses "zero")

We already have a trip planner for Portland Oregon too (the area covered by Google Transit): go to trimet.org, notice the Trip Planner box on the right. TriMet's Transit Tracker also tells you how long it will be until the next bus arrives at your stop (based on real-time GPS tracking, not just the scheduled arrival time); this is also available for WAP-enabled mobile phones or you can call 503-238-RIDE. Works very well.

I live in Portland, so it's pretty cool to see this--couple of comments:

As far as immediate usability goes, the trip planner at http://trimet.org/ is better right now, since you can enter very terse search terms and names of landmarks instead of whole complete addresses for start and end points.

Example--try this in TriMet's page:
STARTING: washington square
GOING: pioneer square

No bothering with addresses, even though this is taking you from a mall way out in Beaverton to the core of downtown Portland. A link to google transit from a google map zoomed to a specific location will fix this issue mostly.

But, this definitely fits a huge need for transit users, because if you don't have a car, it's super annoying to have the only directions to the business/location you are looking for be driving directions. Or, to be looking at a bus route not a map, and vice versa.

Some MAX stations simply don't seem to exist to Google Transit, especially on the westside blue line, and the streetcar seems to be absent too. Since this is Portland, OR only, it didn't seem to localize very well unless the city and state was added to the address. Thankfully, TriMet's Trip Planner does a much better job!

The price Google gives is WRONG. The cost is based off the zones you go through. To go through all three zones, it costs $1.75, not $1.50. I don't even know where $1.50 comes from. It's $1.35 for 2 zones. $1.75 for all 3 zones. This is obviously still beta.

Google is correct; fares increased a while back. Two zones is now $1.50; all zones is $1.80. Check trimet.org. And fares are going to increase again on January first, thanks to high diesel prices.

I agree that the trimet trip planner works just as well, but google's information is accurate, as far as I can tell.

Actually, something extremely similar has been available from TriMet for months (or even years): http://www.trimet.org/go/cgi-bin/plantrip.cgi. It seems Google's version is directly based on that. I wouldn't be surprised if this service is never available for cities other than Portland, or cities that develope a similar search platform for their mass transit system, and give Google access to it.

the only thing I can say I like about the trimet site, is the arrival countdowns (on web http://www.trimet.org/ or pda http://www.trimet.org/pda or cell phone http://www.trimet.org/wap

the only thing I can say I like about the trimet site, is the arrival countdowns (on web http://www.trimet.org/ or pda http://www.trimet.org/pda or cell phone http://www.trimet.org/wap

the only thing I can say I like about the trimet site, is the arrival countdowns (on web http://www.trimet.org/ or pda http://www.trimet.org/pda or cell phone http://www.trimet.org/wap

How about the "busiest". Man, I don't know if you could add any more information. Maybe elevation points and GPS coordinates... :)

Downside: when bus service improves through a far improved ride and reasonable trip times the busses fill up.

True, but busses filling up is what you want--it's optimal use of a resource that needs to be government subsidized to be feasible. I've found that my local mass transit service is even better since they've added GPS bus tracking and accurate-to-the-minute timers available on the web and through WAP browsers.

One note about the subsidies: the traffic in my city is already starting to get quite bad, and our mass transit system is one valuable way to ease traffic burdens on our limited roads. It's a fair trade.

Cuts happen, a fare increase, and people are right back on the roads.

Fares have increased steadily here in Portland, but to be honest, I think it depends on HOW MUCH they increase. It's definately become more expensive, but the rates are still laughable compared to the cost of gas and parking.

http://www.trimet.org/news/pdf/factsheet.pdf

Even at their all-time high ($1.80 for an all zone ticket), it's a screaming good deal for one (weekday) or two (weekend) hours of riding. And, it's $3.75 for a pass that can be used all day, on the streetcar, the light rail and the busses.

Actually I used to live in Portland as well and there is a north south line - it goes all the way to up Jantzen Beach (I've ridden on it!). And last I checked they were working on a line from Beaverton to Wilsonville and another that goes down to Milwaukie.

Also those figures I got from Tri-Met here > http://www.trimet.org/inside/history/maxoverview.h tm

There may have been cost over-runs, but I stand by my original figure. Billion dollars a mile is no way to build a light rail system - even in Seattle.

Finally - you don't have to live near a max line to use it - as most of the busses feed transit centers. I know because I used to use them.

None of which are representative of LRT. To have a better sense of light rail, go see DART, Houston METRO, Salt Lake City UTA, St. Louis Metrolink, San Francisco MUNI, Santa Clara VTA, Philadelphia SEPTA, Portland Max, Baltimore MARC, and so on.

Jointed tracks cause the "clickety-clack" most people are familiar with. Modern systems use Continuously welded rail to solve this problem.

Referring to me? I'm for transit in all its forms (bus/BRT, LRT, heavy rail, monorail, even maglev)but I just want to make sure people make their decisions for the right reasons.

Interesting how Seattle constantly pooches this mass transit thing, while we've got roughly 50 miles well-planned, and heavily utilized light rail in Portland. Oh yeah -- our latest addition opened under budget and under schedule:

http://www.trimet.org/news/archives/2004/apr16inte rstateopens.htm

Suck on it, Seattle.

I think you're mistaking causation.

Busses produce soot
Busses are diesel

Diesel does not necessarily produce soot; any more than gasoline does at least. The problem is old poorly maintained busses. Modern technology does allow for soot-free busses. Think "Hybrid electric diesel busses".

TriMet in Portland will already tell you how many minutes until the next bus arrives at a given stop. I don't have a WAP phone, but if you know the stop number, you can call a phone number and enter the stop number, and it'll give you the info over the phone. It's available on the web, and they have readerboards at several of the train stations (both MAX and Portland Streetcar). The TV displays at the bus stops downtown still only display the scheduled time, rather than an actual countdown, but they're not usually that far off.

I usually pull out mapquest to find the address (cross streets) and then sit there with a subway/bus map to try and figure out how to get there

I know exactly what you mean. Chuck Palahniuk describes it as a town of fugitives and refugees. It's the kind of place where pedestrians and bicyclists have the right of way, regardless of what the street lights might read, and you don't turn into a street until after everyone has crossed (the opposite of Dallas, at least). It's also the kind of place where an office lunch is just as likely to be held in a bar as in the local sandwich shop. Speaking of bars, the area's known for its microbreweries as well. And there's Powell's Books, of course, the largest bookstore in the world, in case you get bored with walking around...

The city itself's only a couple hundred thousand people. You can see a couple mountains from downtown, depending on where you are and how hazy/misty the weather is. There's great scenery just minutes away in every direction. The west stretch of Highway 26 is also called Sunset Highway, for good reason - it runs out to the coast, which has some excellent beaches (look up Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock on Google images for pretty pictures). The weather is generally milder than Dallas; I didn't have air conditioning in my apartment, and only felt I needed it about 3 weeks out of the year, and I kept a kitchen window partly open almost all winter long. As for rain, when I moved up there the average rainfall was 31 inches, and Dallas' was 33 - it's just that Dallas has a few gully-washers yearly, whereas Portland enjoys mist or drizzle a couple times a week much of the year.

I do have to warn you though, it does (or did) have the highest suicide rate in the U.S, probably due in part to the fact that the sky is often overcast, there's less peak light (unless you mean on mountain peaks) at that lattitude, and so forth. However, I actually prefer those conditions to the ones down here, so I was happy during the winter months.

reply 2:

Nice travel-guide-related website: Lonely Planet

events calendar

Powell's history page [comment regarding my relationship with them through my excellent former employer deleted]
If that's not bookish enough, try Reed. "Reedy" is a fitting name for most of the students.

public gardens If you're at all interested in nice gardens to walk through, the International Rose Test Garden is a great place to walk around.
If you have more time, the Japanese Garden is pretty must the only garden outside Japan considered to be "real" (the Mt. Fuji-stand-in doesn't hurt, either)

At some point, if you drink alcohol, or even just eat, you might end up visiting one of these. They've converted a lot of old schools, etc. into pubs along with the usual locations.

You probably won't want to go out there if you don't have much time on your trip, but see if you can recognize this hotel from the picture. [It's this one, Slashdotters]

The Columbia River Highway runs east of Portland, and includes some nice scenery of Multnomah Falls and the Gorge area.

Out west is Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock.

Oh, tying almost everything in town is the MAX, the light rail service. Gues

Don't count on moving here, though: Oregon's full.

Portland, Oregon: Yeah, I'm biased, I was born at and grew up in the Elliot and West Slope neighborhoods. But it frequently is used for movie shoots. Antitrust was filmed and set in Portland and featured a car chase across town from someplace downtown eastside to a TV studio located where Raleigh Hills Elementary School is in real life (not sure what building they used for the movie, but it's nothing anywhere along Schools Ferry Road where the chase ended in the movie). More recently, The Hunted had a long chase all over downtown (with some movie magic to make geography more convienent), culminating in a fight on the roof of a TriMet MAX train (never mind that in real life, the train doesn't spend what seems like 30 miles on the Hawthorne Bridge (it goes about four blocks across the Steel Bridge and there haven't been tracks on the Hawthorne Bridge since Portland Traction went out of business decades ago), and that the overhead lines make standing on the roof of a moving train impossible).

Vancouver, British Columbia: The most generic American city on the planet. Most action movies you see set in American cities are filmed in Vancouver, anymore. Along Came a Spider was filmed in Vancouver, with some stock footage used between scenes to make it look more like Washington, DC. But watch the scenery: The street signs are uniquely Canadian, and you can spot more Vancouver, BC landmarks in the movie than Washington, DC landmarks. And Washington, DC doesn't have that many Douglas Fir trees. A couple decent car chases in that movie. It's also a favorite city to film Jackie Chan movies.

Heh, fine by us in Oregon. We really are full. 8:o)

Seriously, if you want to to hear a 20 minute speech on every last bit of unilaterlally Californian politics that Oregon's taken splash-damage for, spend most of your time in the rain, get bitched at for driving instead of taking TriMet, and rust in traffic waiting for dozens of weekly protests and advocacy parties, and spend it unemployed, then move to Oregon.

For the rest of you, there's Seattle, though they'll bitch about yet another Californian moving there, too.

If you don't want to get bitched at for moving in from California, move to anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. California's not been a good neighbor to us, and it'll save yourself the trouble and the earful to go someplace else. Native northwesterners tend to get hiring priority anyway.

All public transit in the Portland, Oregon metro area has some sort of tracking hardware installed, with several methods available for the public to view it.

Several years ago, TriMet (the main public transit service in Portland) installed GPS/radio units on every bus in the system. Originally, these units only gave information to drivers and those transit system managing folk, enabling them to know the exact location of each bus. The units are mounted next to the farebox facing the driver, and display the current time (I always set my watch from that), how early or late the bus is, and if the bus is on route. The boxes beep and alert the driver if the bus runs more than 1 minute early or 5 minutes late, or if it deviates from route. In the last year or two, they have begun to install 4-line LED displays at major bus transfer points, which indicates the time until the next few busses. A typical display might read something like "15 to Gateway TC due; 6 to Gertz Rd 6 mins; 15 to Gateway TC 8 mins; 15 to Gateway TC 4:50" (The display goes to "due" when the bus is within a block or two of the stop; any bus due to arrive more than 15 minutes from the current time has the scheduled arrival time rather than countdown displayed). This information is also available on the web for all bus lines at all stops at a page on the TriMet site. I'm not aware of telephone access to this information, though schedules are available from an automated phone system.

On the TriMet MAX light rail, the information is obtained from loops buried under the tracks. Time until next train arrival (Similar display to what was depicted above, with Red Line or Blue line and one of a few destination endpoints in place) is displayed at a few major stops. This is unfortunately not as accurate as the GPS system, and can be sometimes several minutes off. I heard one story where a bridge malfunction trapped all the Red Line trains on the wrong side of the river, yet the displays would count down to the arrival until "Red Line to Airport: Due" would come and pass and no Red Line train would come. This is obvious a serious breakdown in the system in a number of ways, and really shows that a public address system (something our city's transit lacks) is necessary. No matter how good the system, it will fail eventually. (For another example of that, read this amusing story about a conspiracy of a bus door, a mailbox, and safety mechanisms getting a bus stuck at one stop for several minutes.)

Finally, on the Portland Streetcar, a tram line overseen by the City of Portland rather than the regional TriMet organization, each streetcar has a NextBus unit onboard, which works by means of GPS. Perhaps the most comprehensive example of this sort of information available in Portland, every single streetcar stop (with the exception of perhaps two or three system which have no practical access to power and/or telecom) has a two-line LED. The display rotates between displaying: the current time, the NextBus URL, "Portland Streetcar: No Smoking on Platform", and the time until the next two streetcar arrivals (e.g. "Streetcar due in 3min & 18min"). This information is also available on the NextBus website for every stop in the system, and I believe this information is also available via WAP.